week 3

Week 3 has so far been super busy. Arnie and I are up to seeing 4 patients...so i have massively improved on my time management skills because i had to! It now takes me about an hour to do my subjective, objective and treatment.

I also think that over the past two and half weeks I have improved in being able to identify the cause of the problem, not just having a list of contributing factors. For example, I saw a patient who had significant patella maltracking, her knee cap was almost sitting on the lateral side of her leg! I had the problem of deciding whether to do a trigger point relaese to her tight lateral quads first or medial patella glides to imporve patella alignment first. With the use of passive accessories, particularly an infra-medial glide, I relased it was the quads pulling out the knee cap and not the lateral retinaculum. Thus the cause of her problem was her quads and so became the start of her treatment. After I had finished the release, her patella sat centrally and so I didn't need to do any patella mobilisations! I still sometimes get this wrong of course, a bit like the chicken and the egg!, but it is definetly becoming more clear.

I think I am also looking at and assessing my patient more thouroughly to give me the answers, rather than racking my brains for information I've memorised. Im also thinking about problems and other potential areas for concern rather than jumping straight to treatment ideas.

This week I'm going to try and improve on being able to talk to patients and write at the same time. CUrrently, i'm re-writing notes after each session as they're indecipherable. I think this skill could improve my time managemnt even further!!